Bahaa Abu al-Ajeen, the boy’s father, set out that evening with his son, alongside his friend and relative, Khaled Abu Ghrab, to check on farmland they owned in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. While they were in what they described as a safe area, far from the so-called “Yellow Line” dividing Gaza into two, the two men and the child were surprised by an Israeli force hiding inside a Palestinian house within the designated safe zone. When they approached the house, the soldiers suddenly emerged and surrounded them, Baha Abu al-Ajeen said.
“If we had known there were Israeli soldiers there, we would never have gone,” he told Mondoweiss. “We were walking inside a safe area and heading to another location in the same zone. We had no idea soldiers were hiding there.”
Speaking from a hospital bed at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in video testimony for Mondoweiss, Abu al-Ajeen recalled that when the soldiers confronted them, his relative told him to sit on the ground. “We sat down to show them that we were unarmed and posed no threat. We regularly use this road inside the safe zone. Then my son started crying loudly out of fear. He had never experienced anything like that before,” he said.
Abu al-Ajeen said he then picked up his son and moved about 50 meters back to calm him down. “As I began walking, the soldiers shouted at me to stop and fired beneath my feet. I stopped immediately. And the moment I stopped, two soldiers pointed their guns at us, and one of them shot my son while he was in my arms. The bullet entered the back of his head and exited through his left eye while he was in my embrace. Then they shot me in the leg.”
The father recalled the moment of the killing when the Israeli soldier aimed before shooting. “The soldier got down on one knee, aimed at my child’s head, and killed him. One bullet,” he said. “I wish they had killed me instead.”
After three-year-old Rayan was shot, Abu al-Ajeen said that he immediately began screaming, “My son, my son.”
“My leg was bleeding, and my child was dying in my arms, taking his final breaths. I begged them to let me die but to save my son. They refused and offered no assistance,” Abu al-Ajeen recounted. “The soldiers told me, ‘Leave your son.’ I told them I wanted to save him, but they kept ordering me to leave him.”
The father also said that while soldiers discussed his leg injury, he heard some of them speaking Arabic amongst themselves. “Leave him. Cut off his leg,” they said, according to Abu al-Ajeen.
Abu al-Ajeen recounted that the soldiers did tie his bleeding leg in the end, after which they placed him in a military jeep with his son’s body beside him. “They drove off at high speed over bumps and potholes while I sat in the back, handcuffed.”
“Every time I spoke or asked for help, the soldiers shouted at me, ‘Be quiet.’ They would not allow me to make a sound, even if I were crying from pain,” he said.
The father said that while he repeatedly pleaded for help for his son, some soldiers mocked him. “Are you so worried about your son, calling out ‘Aboud, Aboud’ all the time?” they told him, according to Abu al-Ajeen. “They left me bleeding for six continuous hours.”
They drove him and his son from one place to another inside the vehicle while he bled, Abu al-Ajeen continued. Close to midnight, they abandoned them near Kissufim, a crossing point between Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
As the soldiers dropped him off, Abu al-Ajeen lost track of his son and kept asking them where he was. “And they answered me, ‘your son is next to you,’” he said. “I was shocked to discover that they had wrapped him in a black plastic bag and thrown him beside me.”
jfc
Every post i see about “israel” makes me support Hamas even more. Death to zionism